The IMSA GT Chevy Monza: Simplicity meets monstrosity

A grocery-getter becomes a champion.

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Turn back the clock to the IMSA GT series, and you'll struggle to find much wrong with the legendary sports-car organization.

It came to life in the 1970s when BMW, Jaguar, Porsche, and others dialed up the horsepower and intensified the styling on their production-based race cars to create cartoonish versions of what could be found on showroom floors.

Production shells were strengthened by steel roll cages, and it wasn't long before some of the GT cars looked more like a maze of welded tubing than anything that rolled off the assembly line.

And somewhere in the middle of the exotica, the Chevy Monza, a misfit among American muscle cars (remember, this is the Mustang II era), found its home.

The unheralded grocery-getters were transformed into championship-winning racers thanks to a collaboration between GM and Ohio's DeKon Engineering. Al Holbert won back-to-back titles with the Monza in 1976-1977, using its tube-frame chassis, 350-cubic-inch small-block V8, and generally awesome fender flares to outpace the European machinery.

Monza's brief period atop IMSA GT was a shining moment for GM, but it didn't do much for sales. The model was discontinued in 1980.

The Monza pictured here now competes in vintage races across Europe, but sadly, it's epic bicentennial-era stars-and-stripes No. 1 has been replaced with a far less patriotic set of numbers. Here it is in action: